If, then, it was not in theory or speculation that Dr. John Brown excelled,—and that there was no deficiency of hereditary speculative faculty in his family, but much the reverse, is proved not only by the theological distinction of his predecessors in the family, and by the brilliant career of his cousin, Dr. Samuel Brown, but also by the reputation among us at this moment of his still nearer relative, the eminent Philosophical Chemist of Edinburgh University,—in what was it that he did excel? It was in what I may call an unusual appreciativeness of all that did recommend itself to him as good and admirable. In few men has there been such a fulfilment of the memorable apostolic injunction: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,—if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,—think on these things.” The context of that passage shows that what was enjoined on the Philippians was a habit of meditative and ruminative appreciation of all that was noteworthy, of every variety, within accredited and prescribed limits. Dr. John Brown was a model in this respect. Within the limits of his preference for the concrete and practical over the abstract and theoretical, he was a man of peculiarly keen relish for anything excellent, and of peculiar assiduity in imparting his likings to others.
His habit of appreciativeness is seen, on the small scale, even in such a matter as his appropriation and use of pithy phrases and anecdotes picked up miscellaneously. “‘Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask what you mix your colours with?’ said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter. ‘With brains, sir,’ was the gruff reply.” Having met this story in some Life of the painter Opie, Dr. John Brown had fastened on it, or it had adhered to him; and not only did he hang one whole paper on it, entitled With Brains, Sir, but he made it do duty again and again in other papers. At times when Dr. Chalmers happened to be talked to about some person not already known to him, and was told that the person was a man of ability, “Yes, but has he wecht, Sir, has he wecht?” was his common question in reply; and, as Dr. John Brown had also perceived that it is not mere cleverness that is effective in the world, and that weight is the main thing, he was never tired of bringing in Dr. Chalmers’s phrase to enforce that meaning. When Dr. John wanted to praise anything of the literary kind as being of the most robust intellectual quality, not food for babes but very “strong meat” indeed, he would say “This is lions’ marrow.” As he was not a man to conceal his obligations, even for a phrase, we learn from him incidentally that he had taken the metaphor originally from this passage in one of the pieces of the English poet Prior:—
“That great Achilles might employ
The strength designed to ruin Troy,
He dined on lions’ marrow, spread
On toasts of ammunition bread.”
Dr. John had a repertory of such individual phrases and aphorisms, picked up from books or conversation, which he liked to use as flavouring particles for his own text. He dealt largely also in extracts and quotations of greater length. Any bit that struck him as fine in a new book of verses, any scrap of old Scottish ballad not generally known, any interesting little poem by a friend of his own that he had seen in manuscript, or any similar thing communicated to him as not having seen the light before, was apt to be pounced upon, stamped with his imprimatur, and turned into service in his own papers, as motto, relevant illustration, or pleasant addition. His fondness for quotation from his favourite prose authors has already been mentioned. In fact, some of his papers are little more than patches of quotations connected by admiring comments. In such cases it is as if he said to his readers, “How nice this is, how capital! don’t you agree with me?” Sometimes you may not quite agree with him, or you may wish that he had thrown fewer quotations at you, and had said more on the subject out of his own head; but you always recognise his appreciativeness.
On the larger scale of the papers themselves the same appreciativeness is discernible. Take first the papers which are most in the nature of criticisms. Such are those entitled Henry Vaughan, Arthur H. Hallam, Thackeray’s Death, Notes on Art, John Leech, Halle’s Recital, and Sir Henry Raeburn. Whether in the literary papers of this group, or in the art papers, you can see how readily and strongly Dr. John Brown could admire, and what a propagandist he was of his admirations. If Henry Vaughan the Silurist, the quaint and thoughtful English poet of the seventeenth century, is now a better known figure in English literary history than he was a generation ago, it is owing, I believe, in some measure, to Dr. John Brown’s resuscitation of him. So, when Tennyson’s In Memoriam appeared in 1850, and all the world was moved by that extraordinary poem, who but Dr. John Brown could not rest till he had ascertained all that was possible about young Arthur Hallam, by obtaining a copy of his “Remains in Verse and Prose,” privately printed in 1834, with a memoir by the author’s father, Hallam the historian, and till he had been permitted to give to the public, in liberal extracts from the memoir, and by quotation from the pieces themselves, such an authentic account of Tennyson’s dead friend as all were desiring? The paper called Thackeray’s Death, though the only paper on Thackeray now to be found among Dr. John Brown’s collected writings, is by no means, I believe, the only paper he wrote on Thackeray. If there was a Thackeray-worshipper within the British Islands, it was Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. Thackeray was his greatest man by far, after Scott, or hardly after Scott, among our British novelists,—his idol, almost his demigod; he had signified this, if I mistake not, in an article on Thackeray while Thackeray’s fame was still only in the making; and the particular paper now left us is but a re-expression of this high regard for Thackeray as an author, blended with reminiscences of his own meetings with Thackeray in Edinburgh, and testimonies of his warm affection for the man. Another of his chief admirations was Ruskin. I can remember how, when the first volume of the Modern Painters appeared, the rumour of it ran at once through Edinburgh, causing a most unusual stir of interest in the new book, and in the extraordinary “Oxford Graduate” who was its author; and I am pretty sure now that it was Dr. John Brown that had first imported the book among us, and had enlightened Dr. Chalmers and others as to its merits. There is no article on Ruskin among the collected papers; but there are frequent references to him, and his influence can be discerned in all the Art-criticisms. These Art-criticisms of Dr. John Brown, however, are hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of Art are expounded or applied in them. All that the critic does is to stand, as it were, before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a Raeburn, a Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it might happen, some new performance by one of his Edinburgh artist-friends, Duncan, Sir George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,—exclaiming “How good this is, how true, how powerful, how pathetic!” while he attends to the direct human interest of the subject, interprets the story of the picture in his own way, and throws in kindly anecdotes about the painter. It is the same, mutatis mutandis, for music, in his notices of pieces by Beethoven and others, as heard at Halle’s concerts. His most elaborate paper of Art-criticism is that entitled John Leech. It is throughout a glowing eulogium on the celebrated caricaturist, with notices of some of his best cartoons, but passing into an affectionate memoir of the man, on his own account and as the friend of Thackeray, and indeed incorporating reminiscences of Leech and Thackeray that had been supplied him by a friend of both as material for a projected Memoir of Leech on a larger scale. If not in this particular paper, at least here and there in some of the others, the query may suggest itself whether the laudation is not excessive. One asks sometimes whether the good Dr. John was not carried away by the amiable fault of supposing that what happens to be present before one of a decidedly likeable kind at any moment, especially if it be recommended by private friendship, must be the very nonsuch of its kind in the whole world. Another query forced on one is whether there did not sometimes lurk under Dr. John’s superlative admiration of a chief favourite in any walk an antipathy to some other in the same walk. It is told of Sir Philip Francis, the reputed author of Junius, that, when he was an old man, he gave this counsel to a promising young member of the House of Commons whom he had heard deliver a speech distinguished by the generosity of its praises of some of his fellow-members,—“Young man, take my advice; never praise anybody unless it be in odium tertii,” i.e. “unless it be to the discredit of some third party.” No man ever acted less in the spirit of this detestable, this truly diabolic, advice than Dr. John Brown; and one’s question rather is whether he did not actually reverse it by never attacking or finding fault with any one unless it were in laudem tertii, to the increased credit of some third party. Whether he was so actuated, consciously or unconsciously, in his declaration of irreconcilable dislike to Maclise, and his exceptionally severe treatment of that artist, I will not venture to say; but I can find no other sufficient explanation of his habitual depreciation of Dickens. His antipathy to Dickens, his resentment of any attempted comparison between Dickens and Thackeray, was proverbial among his friends, and amounted almost to a monomania.
While, as will have been seen, Dr. John was by no means insensible to impressions from anything excellent coming from besouth the Tweed, it was naturally in his own Scotland, and among the things and persons immediately round about him there, that his faculty of appreciation revelled most constantly. With the majority of his literary fellow-countrymen that have attained popularity in Scotland during the last fifty years, he derived many of his literary instincts from the immense influence of “Scotticism” which had been infused into the preceding generation, and is seen, in his choice of themes, following reverently in the wake of the great Sir Walter. He reminds one somewhat of Aytoun in this respect, though with a marked Presbyterian difference. Most of his papers are on Scottish subjects; and in some of them, such as his Queen Mary’s Child-Garden, his Minchmoor, the paper called The Enterkin, that entitled A Jacobite Family, and that entitled Biggar and the House of Fleming, we have descriptions of Scottish scenes and places very much in the spirit of Sir Walter, though by no means slavishly so, with notes of their historical associations, and recovery of local legends, romances, and humours. In a more original vein, though also principally Scottish, are those papers which may be described as memoirs and character-sketches in a more express sense than the three or four already referred to as combining memoir with criticism. By far the most important of these is his Memoir of his own Father, in supplement to the Life of his Father by the Rev. Dr. John Cairns, and published under the too vague title of Letter to John Cairns, D.D. It is a really beautiful piece of writing, not only full of filial affection, and painting for us his father’s life and character with vivid fidelity, but also interesting for its reminiscences of the author’s own early years, and its sketches of several eminent ministers of the Scottish Secession communion whom he had known as friends of his father. The paper entitled Dr. Chalmers, though not particularly good, attests the strength of the impression made by that great man on Dr. John Brown, as on every one else that knew Dr. Chalmers. Better, and indeed fine, though slight, are Edward Forbes, Dr. George Wilson, The Duke of Athole, Struan, and Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune. On the whole, however, the most characteristic papers of the Memoir class are those of Medical Biography, including Locke and Sydenham, Dr. Andrew Combe, Dr. Henry Marshall and Military Hygiene, Our Gideon Grays, Dr. Andrew Brown and Sydenham, Dr. Adams of Banchory, Dr. John Scott and His Son, Mr. Syme, and Sir Robert Christison. Sydenham was Dr. John Brown’s ideal of a physician, and his account of that English physician and of his place in the history of medicine is of much value. The medical profession is indebted to him also for his warm-hearted vindication of those whom he calls, after Scott, “Our Gideon Grays,”—the hard-working and often poorly paid medical practitioners of our Scottish country villages and parishes,—and for the justice he has done to such a scholarly representative of that class as the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, and to such recent medical reformers as Dr. Andrew Combe and Dr. Henry Marshall. Especially interesting to us here ought to be the obituary sketches of Syme and Christison, so recently the ornaments of the Medical School of Edinburgh University. He threw his whole heart into his sketch of Syme, his admiration of whom, dating from the days when he had been Syme’s pupil and apprentice in surgery, had been increased by life-long intimacy. I may therefore dwell a little on this sketch, the rather because it reminds me of perhaps the only occasion on which I was for some hours in the society of Syme and Dr. John Brown together.
In the autumn of 1868, Carlyle, then Lord Rector of our University, and in the seventy-third year of his age, was persuaded, on account of some little ailment of his, to come to Edinburgh and put himself under the care of Professor Syme for surgical treatment. Syme, proud of such a patient, and resolved that he should have his best skill, would hear of no other arrangement than that Carlyle should be his guest for the necessary time. For a fortnight or more, accordingly, Carlyle resided with Syme in his beautiful house of Millbank in the southern suburb of our city. Pains were taken to prevent the fact from becoming known, that Carlyle might not be troubled by visitors. But one day, when Carlyle was convalescent, there was a quiet little dinner party at Millbank to meet him. Besides Syme and Carlyle, and one or two of the members of Syme’s family, there were present only Dr. John Carlyle, Dr. John Brown, and myself. It was very pleasant, at the dinner table, to observe the attention paid by the manly, energetic, and generally peremptory and pugnacious, little surgeon to his important guest, his satisfaction in having him there, and his half-amused, half-wondering glances at him as a being of another genus than his own, but whom he had found as lovable in private as he was publicly tremendous. There was no “tossing and goring of several persons” by Carlyle, in that dining-room at all events, but only genial and cheerful talk about this and that. After dinner, we five went upstairs to a smaller room, where the talk was continued, still more miscellaneously, Syme and Carlyle having most of it. That very day there had been sent to Carlyle, by his old friend David Laing, a copy of the new edition which Laing had just privately printed of the rare Gude and Godly Ballates by the brothers Wedderburn, originally published in 1578; and Carlyle, taking up the volume from the table, would dip into it here and there, and read some passages aloud for his own amusement and ours. One piece of fourteen stanzas he read entire, with much gusto, and with excellent chaunt and pronunciation of the old Scotch. Here are three of the stanzas:—